Cottbus refuses to rescind doctorate

The German technical university BTU Cottbus has decided not to rescind the doctorate of Prof. Dr. Detlev Dähnert, the general manager of the energy company Vattenfall located in this part of Germany.
Dähnert's dissertation, submitted in 1999 (Bewältigung technischer und sozialer Probleme bei der Konzeption von Umsiedlungen) is about moving entire villages in order to mine coal using an opencut method. The village Horno was one of the most well-know of the villages that were moved and then demolished in German.

Dähnert was then named honorary professor at the local engineering college HS Lausitz in 2005.

In the summer of 2011 someone set up a web site, Vattenplag, that accused the dissertation of containing plagiarism. They posted a link on the VroniPlag Wiki site with the name and a link to the page. Journalists reported that VroniPlag Wiki was investigating the case, which was pointed out as not true. Just because the name was on the page didn't mean anything. The entry was deleted from VroniPlag Wiki's public pages, the page Vattenplag disappeared, and everything was quiet.

In September a page appeared on the Internet pages of an environmental group detailing the plagiarism. VroniPlag Wiki began investigating and discovered that there were indeed large amounts of plagiarism. The case was made public in November 2011.

Dähnert's dissertation on VroniPlag Wiki

44 % of the pages have been found to be plagiarsms. The red ones above are more than 50 % of a page. There is a German-language list of interesting pages, and here are some of my favorite pages: 28 (some text changed in the middle of the page) - 35 (reference to Horno removed) - 48 (commas inserted) - 103 (wrote out a number).

The BTU Cottbus has now declared that the thesis just has technical weaknesses. The committee and an external member from the German research council DFG looked for conscious manipulation of data,  unacceptable co-authorship without personal contribution, or other deceptive practices. They found no evidence of the above, so there is no case, they found.

The local paper has gone all ballistic about this. They quoted me from last year, when I had stated that the case was not a VroniPlag Wiki case. Sure: it wasn't then, it is now. And now they have an editorial that blows your shoes off: improper German; the university says everything okay, so it must be so; these anonymous people with their denunciations; the poor man, hung out on the stalks. They even pick up on my current demand for publication of the reasoning behind the committee's decision and deride it. VroniPlag Wiki is anonymous, how can they be demanding that the secret report be published? Easy: the committee members may remain anonymous. But I need to be able to explain to my students why this kind of simple plagiarism is okay in a dissertation in Cottbus, but will get them a failing mark in any of my classes. The current joke is that zu Guttenberg should have gone to Cottbus to get his degree, seems they have different standards there.

I hope that a lot of protest is raised about this case —anyone who can read can see the plagiarisms. But the comments in the paper are full of hateful comments directed at VroniPlag Wiki and not at the author of this document accepted as a doctoral thesis.

One should perhaps note that Vattenfall gives lots of research money to the BTU Cottbus and to the HS Lausitz, and they put a lot of ads in the local paper.

Veronica Saß loses court case

The daughter of a Bavarian politician, Veronica Saß, remains with the doctorate that the University of Constance rescinded in May 2011 after it was determined that over a third of her thesis was plagiarized - pages and pages, including the footnotes. Saß went to court to fight the university over the question, and the court ruled today - after delivering a stern lecture during the court date yesterday - that the university was within its rights in rescinding the doctorate.

Saß tried a novel form of defense - she admitted that she plagiarized, but said that the university was negligent in advising her as an external student on the fine points of scientific writing. As a friend has noted - maybe we need public service announcement daily on the radio on how to quote someone elses work. Where does it start, where does it end, where does it come from. That's all.

There are a number of reports in German (taz - dapd - Spiegel Online - Südkurier - press statement of the university) and the radio station WDR had a special day with lots of reports in German about plagiarism.

It is a relief that at least the courts in Germany are upholding good scientific practice, even if the universities seem to be having trouble inculcating that in their students and professors.

There is one title Ms. Saß still holds, as the taz wryly remarks - it is her nickname, Vroni, that gave the plagiarism documentation group, VroniPlag Wiki, its name.

schavanplag

And now the post you have all been waiting for. Sorry about taking so long, but I had a lot of other things planned for the past few days (teaching, research meeting, re:publica). I was offline most of the past three days (although a friend noted that what I call offline would be considered online for most "normal" people).

A fax was sent to press around Germany giving the link to a blog that had been set up during April 2012: schavanplag. The anonymous blog documents fragments in the dissertation of the German Minister of Education, Annette Schavan, submitted to the University of Düsseldorf 32 years ago.

There are fragments on about 17 % of the pages, but some of the fragments are very thin. Page 91, for example, consists of just two words that complete a sentence from the previous page. I counted the number of lines involved, and assuming 30 lines per page on average this is just 6 % of the lines in the book.

But it should not be considered that I am making light of the situation and shrugging it off. When one looks closely at the fragments one sees that there is a good bit of systematic scientific sloppiness in the whole thing.

I've looked quite closely at this, actually, as many of the fragments were hosted in a discreet discussion area of the VroniPlag platform for the past 4-5 months. They were hotly debated, and it was discussed how to proceed with this. When it came to a final vote, there was no majority for putting the documentation out with the author's name on it on the home page. But it was clear to all that the champions for the case were free to take the material and put it on another platform. And that is exactly what was done.

On the "Shitstorm Scale" (developed by the Swiss social media researchers Barbara Schwede und Daniel Graf) we currently have a hurricane level 6 sweeping the country. The press is in a frenzy, radio and TV are reporting, and the blogosphere, which was mostly having a fun conference in Berlin at the re:publica is screaming up a storm.

I have been asked many times what went on, as I am a named and visible member of the group. I have tried over and over to explain the difference between to open discussion of the text and the open naming of the author. I have tried to explain that this was a borderline case that did not have urgency, in my opinion, when compared with the major plagiarisms that are raging on VroniPlag at the moment. But people want a number: 10%, and that's too much, off with her head.

The university will determine if they will open an investigation. The hot-headed bloggers and twitters who have spent a nanosecond or so looking at the material are, of course, demanding that she step down, and are berating VroniPlag for having decided not to press forward on this case.

Sometimes people have to be reminded that VroniPlag is a group of hobbyists, not the Central Plagiarism Agency that has to search and destroy all plagiarism as soon as possible. I do wish the press would not twist my words quite so much. Something I say will be twisted to imply what the journalist in question wants me to say: she's guilty, she's not guilty, the group is fighting, the group is small, the group is larger, the new blog "stole" the material (it did not).  I corrected a radio journalist three times during a live show today, and he still didn't get it right. Oh well - more discussion on plagiarism is good at any rate. And I do hope that some movement in getting something like the Office of Research Integrity set up in Germany will soon be visible.

VroniPlag Case 23 had to withdraw IEEE Paper

An interesting find in the extensive IEEE database of retracted papers (Search Google for "Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles" site:ieee.org, there are more than 24.000 entries) on VroniPlag case 23: A paper on the topic of the dissertation, published by the author after the dissertation, that had to be retracted on account of plagiarism:

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles (link)

"Novel Algorithms for Subgroup Detection in Terrorist Networks" by Nasrullah Memon, Abdul Rasool Qureshi, Uffe Kock Wiil, and David L. Hicks in the Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, March 2009, pp. 572-577 

After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles. This paper contains significant portions of original text from the papers cited below. 

The original text was copied with insufficient attribution (including appropriate references to the original author(s) and/or paper titles) and without permission. (more).

I think the entire publication history of these authors needs to be looked at a little bit more closely. Especially since Memon, Hicks and Wiil all still list the withdrawn publication on their publication lists, and they seem to publish a lot together. Only Qureshi doesn't have the paper listed.

I informed the rector of the Aalborg university about the VroniPlag case on April 20. I still have not had any indication that my email was received, so I suppose I shall have to write again.

Chatzimarkakis loses court case about loss of doctorate

Georgios Chatzimarkakis dissertation was analysed by VroniPlag and found to have more than 70% of the pages containing plagiarism. The University of Bonn rescinded his doctorate, and he took the University to court. On March 22, 2012 the court in Cologne ruled against him. The judgement was published today, and it is quite a judgement: http://www.justiz.nrw.de/nrwe/ovgs/vg_koeln/j2012/6_K_6097_11urteil20120322.html

The court follows the documentation of VroniPlag and mentions it a number of times in the judgement. The court makes clear that both word-for-word and paraphrased copies need to be clearly marked and determines that this was not the case in all but two of the fragments VroniPlag documented.

It is great to have a legal judgement on this issue, especially one that is so clear. The court also explicitly discusses how VroniPlag weighs a case, and found this to be logical. If you read German - I strongly suggest reading the entire judgement.

VroniPlag Case 22: Medicine

There was a lot of discussion in the group about working on medical dissertations. They tend, in Germany, to often be lightweights compared to dissertations in other fields. But people who submit and defend a medical dissertation also get the "Dr." to put in their passports and on their shingles, so the group went ahead with this case, especially as it is so special: 48% of the pages are from just one source, and many of these pages are over 75% plagiarized. Have a look for yourself: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Ahg

One year of VroniPlag

Here is a wonderful attempt to visualize the work of one year of VroniPlag - makes it awfully clear that the universities need to sort out how to deal with these problems quickly. The map is also interesting.

A graphical representation of the work of one year of VroniPlag plagiarism documentation

VroniPlag Case 21

And another case hits the home page of VroniPlag. Case 21 is another dissertation from the TU Berlin with the same doctoral advisor as Jürgen Goldschmidt. There are copies of the Wikipedia from around 2004, copies of texts about earthquakes in Switzerland that have Iraq switched in, and copies from textbooks. And there seems to be more rolling in by the minute.

VroniPlag: Case 20

Tonight the twentieth case of plagiarism was documented on the VroniPlag site. It's another doctorate in law, this time from the University of Hanover. And it's another summa cum laude dissertation that even starts off (page 1) with a plagiarism from a book by the person who published the dissertation. Maybe this one will finally get more of a discussion going in Germany.

I've added the case to the open plagiarism table.

And I apologize to all readers with comments - when I turned on the moderation I forgot to put in my email, so they have just been collecting up. I've sorted out the random spam and published the rest. And now have a proper email entered.

VroniPlag case 19

Case 19 has made its way to the front page of VroniPlag. This is the first dissertation submitted to a private university for finance, the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Interestingly, the accreditation body for the school, the Wissenschaftsrat, had strongly recommended accrediting the school but not giving them the right to have doctoral students. The Hessian state disregarded this and gave the school dissertation rights.

The university president responded to the notice of the documentation promptly and will be starting an investigation.

This thesis includes an extremely large bibliography, around 2200 entries on 170 pages. There are so many errors in the bibliography that a separate documentation page has been opened for this. In addition to many typographical errors, errors that the source made are also copied. There are also many instances of translation plagiarism to be found here.

Who are the VroniPlag people?

If you read German, I have a pseudo-interview published in attempto!, Nr. 31 / December 2011, page 7-9. It attempts to explain why people spend their time looking for plagiarists.

Open cases of plagiarism in Germany

Note: this list has moved to the page Scorecard, and is linked from the homepage. It will no longer be updated here.

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The VroniPlag platform has currently documented 22 23 cases of plagiarism in dissertations or habilitations since the zu Guttenberg case was documented on the GuttenPlagWiki. The first few cases - especially ones involving politicians in the wake of the zu Guttenberg case - were dealt with promptly:

Thesis, Link	Name, University	Documentation public	Current status
KTzG 2009	Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (University of Bayreuth)	2011-02-16	After 2 weeks: doctorate rescinded
VS 2009	Veronika Saß (University of Constance)	2011-03-28	After 6 weeks: doctorate rescinded
MCP 2007	Matthias Pröfrock (University of Tübingen)	2011-04-04	After 12 weeks: doctorate rescinded
SKM 2001	Silvana Koch-Mehrin (University of Heidelberg)	2011-04-10	After 10 weeks: doctorate rescinded
GC 2000	Georgios Chatzimarkakis (University of Bonn)	2011-05-15	After 10 weeks: doctorate rescinded
BDS 2008	Bijan Djir-Sarai (University of Cologne)	2011-06-01	After 40 weeks doctorate rescinded
UB 2011	Uwe Brinkmann (University of Hamburg)	2011-06-08	After 6 weeks: doctorate rescinded
MM 1987	Margarita Mathiopoulos (University of Bonn)	2011-06-14	23 years after the first investigation on accused plagiarism  and 10 months after the publication on VroniPlag: doctorate rescinded
SH 2003	Siegfried Haller (University of Halle-Wittenberg)	2011-07-24	After 9 months: doctorate rescinded
JG 2009	Dr. Jürgen Goldschmidt (Technical University of Berlin)	2011-07-30	Still open
CS 2008	Prof. Dr. Cornelia Eva Scott (University of Krakau, Poland)	2011-08-08	University of Cracow annonces plagiarism found on Jan 12, 2012, refers case to a central authority
AH 1998	Dr. Arne Heller (University of Hamburg)	2011-08-28	Still open
MW 2009	Dr. Martin Winkels (University of Bonn)	2011-09-05	Still open
DV 2005	Dr. Daniel Volk (University of Würzburg)	2011-09-19	Still open
UT 2003	PD Dr. Ulf Teichgräber (Charité Berlin)	2011-10-12	Still open
PES 2004	Prof. Dr. Patrick Ernst Sensburg (Fernuniversität Hagen)	2011-10-18	After 8 weeks the university determines this to be "no case".
DD 1999	Prof. Dr. Detlev Dähnert (BTU Cottbus)	2011-11-01	Still open
NK 2006	Dr. Nalan Kayhan (University of Heidelberg)	2011-11-17	Still open
AWB 1997	Prof. Dr. Andreas Wolfgang Bonz (University of Heidelberg)	2011-12-21	Still open
MH 2007	Dr. Michael Heun (Frankfurt School of Finance and Management)	2012-02-16	Still open
LM 1999	Prof. Dr. Loukas A. Mistelis (University of Hanover)	2012-03-12	Still open
AOS 2008	Dr. Asso Omer Saiwani (TU Berlin)	2012-03-26	Still open
AHG 2006	Dr. Arne Herting (University of Bochum)	2012-04-10	Still open
NM 2007	Prof. Dr. Nasrullah Memon (University of Aalborg, Denmark)	2012-04-18	Still open

But since June, the universities have fallen asleep, it seems. I have written letters asking about the status of the investigations. In general, they are not expecting results before Christmas.

Gerhard Fröhlich from the University of Linz put it so nicely:

Self control mechanisms are a myth in science to avoid any serious external control. I have studied all fraud affairs precisely and in almost every case anonymous allegations coupled with mass media outrage – in most recent years with an interim period of outrage on the internet – were necessary before the institutions themselves agreed to take action.

It seems that the moment the outrage dies down, the speed of investigation slows to a crawl.

Updates:

• 2011-12-21: Another case from the medical faculty of the University Heidelberg added; the University of Bonn is said to be prepared to rescind the doctorate of Margarita Mathiopoulos 
• 2011-12-22: The Fernuniversität Hagen determines the case of Patrick Sensburg to be too weak to do anything about. The dean of the faculty announces on radio that the documentation is "malicious". The reader is encouraged to read the documentation linked above for themselves. The expert opinions on which this decision was based remain under cover. 
• 2012-01-27: The University of Cracow had determined that there is plagiarism in the Scott dissertation and has referred the case to a central authority.  The decision by the University of Bonn on Mathiopolous, expected for February 12, is delayed to April 18 by an extension appeal filed by her lawyers. 
• 2012-02-16:  Case 19, from the private Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, is added to the home page.
• 2012-03-05: University of Cologne rescinded the doctorate of German member of Parliament Bijan Dijr-Sarai
• 2012-03-12: Case 20, a dissertation in law from the University of Hanover, is added to the home page. 
• 2012-03-21: A decision is expected by the University of Halle on April 18. 
• 2012-03-26: Case 21, a dissertation from the same doctoral advisor at the TU Berlin as Jürgen Goldschmidt, is posted on the home page. Many texts appear to have been copied and the names of the country under investigation, Iraq, exchanged for the country name in the original work. 
• 2012-04-10: Case 22, a medical dissertation from the University of Bochum, is posted on the home page. 
• 2012-04-18: The University of Bonn rescinded the doctorate of Margarita Mathiopoulos and the University of Halle-Wittenberg rescinded the doctorate of Siegfried Haller. Case 23, submitted in English to the University of Alborg, Denmark, by Nasrullah Memon, is added to the list.  

University of Heidelberg refuses Koch-Mehrin's protest

The University of Heidelberg has announced that they have rejected the protest that Silvana Koch-Mehrin lodged against the rescinding of her doctorate earlier this year. Articles can be found at Spiegel Online, Süddeutsche, n-tv, among others.

The documentation at VroniPlag has one third of the pages containing plagiarism.

Koch-Mehrin has stepped down from official duties except for her mandate in the European Parliament. In September 2011 news media in Germany complained that she was not even attending parliamentary meetings, although still a member .

Her lawyer notes that the next step would be to take the university to court, but she herself has not stated whether she will take that step or not.

VroniPlag: The next three cases

So sorry not to be keeping up, but the beginning of a semester is always a time sink and this one was no different - plus all the VroniPlag work.

I owe my English-language readers the next three cases published on the home page of VroniPlag:

• Case 14: The first medical plagiarism in the collection and the first habilitation, the second doctorate that is written in Germany, submitted by Ulf Teichgräber to the Charité, Berlin. This is a very strange work, as it incorporates large portions of three doctoral theses that were done by people in his department - and one which was submitted after the habilitation. There are some mighty strange plagiarisms here, 29% of the pages are from this doctorate submitted later and page 101 of the habilitation includes "blah blah blah see figure 3-6 blah blah blah" which is an exact copy of the doctorate. Except the figure - which is also taken from the doctorate - was renumbered in the habilitation to be figure 4-20. The herausragende Fundstellen, the outstanding discoveries, is a long and fascinating documentation and includes passages taken from common publications of the four. The Charité has apparently already investigated this and found it to be okay. I sent a written protest to the dean in the hopes that the investigation will be reopened.
• Case 15: Patrick Ernst Sensburg, member of parliament for the CDU and professor at a college that educates public servants, submitted his thesis to the distance education University of Hagen. He has the distinction of having the first thesis to have a typo in the title. He took up the gauntlet, choosing the weakest fragments documented by VroniPlag and discussing them on his home page, completely ignoring the strongest fragments. Unfortunately, one cannot comment there. He complained to the press that one cannot comment on VroniPlag - strange, as it uses a MediaWiki under the hood that permits a discussion page for each and every page, and there is a forum available - and that one cannot contact the VroniPlag people to discuss things. One magazine offered to set up a discussion between me and Mr. Sensburg, I immediately agreed, but he decided not to pursue this avenue of discussion until his university has reached a decision. So be it.
  
• Case 16: Detlev Dähnert, honorary professor of the engineering college in Lausitz and manager at the Vattenfall Europe Carbon Storage. Earlier this year anonymous persons set up a VattenPlag Wiki that got itself removed. They had published a link in the VroniPlag forum and the press picked it up, stating that "VroniPlag" had discovered plagiarism. Okay, that starts with "V", too. Anyway, out of curiosity one of the VroniPlag researchers started looking, and soon found plagiarisms. But since only a digital copy of the thesis was available, it took some time to locate and obtain a printed copy. Only when a printed copy can be verified to be identical to the digital copy that is available, will the VroniPlag group go out with a name for the plagiarized work. In the meantime, the number of pages with plagiarism has topped 35%.
  

Is anything happening about all these plagiarisms? Yes. I attended a symposium put on by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (I seem not to have blogged about that) and the German parliamentary committee on education and research will be holding a hearing Nov. 9, 2011 on the topic. I have been asked to participate as an expert witness. And the DFG is holding a (closed) discussion day on the topic the end of November.

I have taken to liken changes in the German educational system to glacial movements. Even though many are disappointed that things are not happening faster, the glacier is receding, very slowly, but things are indeed happening. This is very encouraging.

VroniPlag - the next cases

Goodness, you get busy with something else, and the VroniPlag count has again been upped. The new kids on the block are:

• Case 11: Arne Heller, a lawyer in Hamburg, submitted a dissertation on managing boards. He is currently applying for a habilitation, the second doctorate necessary for a university professorship in Germany. There was a nasty spat that ensued over an article in Die Zeit accusing VroniPlag of letting itself be instrumentalized by unknown persons from the University of Hamburg using VroniPlag to subvert the habilitation process. Heller has, however, already passed Chatzimarkakis with the amount of plagiarism (72% of the pages) and is not too far behind the gold standard, zu Guttenberg (94% of the pages). Many VroniPlag activists joined the fight on the comments page, which run to 39 pages at the time this blog post is being written.
• Case 12: Martin Winkels submitted a dissertation on the Ostpolitik that has plagiarism on 24% of the pages. Since he is neither a politician or well known, there was a longish discussion about whether the name should be made public or not. The VroniPlag group voted that since a thesis is published, it is fair to discuss it and its author. The vote was not unanimous, however.
• Case 13: Daniel Volk, Member of the German Parliament for the FDP. His thesis on international law is currently at just over 20% of the pages plagiarized. He insists to the press that nothing is wrong with his dissertation.

It is also encouraging to see the activity that is starting in the fall term:

• The Charité is holdling a symposium in Berlin on October 7, 2011: "Responsible conduct of research in academic medicine: From neglect to action plan" 
• The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung will be holding a conference on October 11, 2011 about quality assurance at university that is said to be streamed on "Plagiatsfälle in der Wissenschaft -Wie lässt sich Qualitätssicherung an Hochschulen verbessern?"
• The DFG is said to be having a conference the end of November, I don't have a prospectus yet.
• I have been invited to speak at many gatherings, and have been asked to attend a parliamentary committee meeting as an expert witness. Both the Green party and the SPD have prepared motions about academic misconduct that they are planning on presenting to parliament. 

I will try and report on as many of these as possible so that non-German speakers can see what is happening. 

Case Number 10

Another VroniPlag case hits the 10% level: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Scott









More details on the German professor who did her dissertation in Krakow, Poland, here: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Cs